Blackburn’s account, in an interview given some ten years later, shared the skepticism toward academic institutions that Pound voiced on many occasions, particularly the view that existing curricula did not include earlier poetries validated by a modernist cultural agenda. Blackburn cast himself as the advocate of modernism forcing a revision in the university curriculum by reviving older course offerings:
What got me started on Provençal was reading squibs of it in The Cantos and not being able to understand it, which annoyed me. It hadn’t been taught at Wisconsin since the 30’s, so I found Professor [Karl] Bottke, the medievalist out there, who offered to tutor me in it. I needed the course for credit, and to give credit he needed five students. I got him eight and we had a very good course.
One of Blackburn’s classmates, Sister Bernetta Quinn, who subsequently devoted several critical studies to Pound’s writing, {226} described the course as an effort “to act upon their master’s counsel” in works like The Spirit of Romance (Quinn 1972:94). She also noted that Blackburn’s imitation of the “master” evolved into a translation project: “Many of our class assignments, refined, appeared in 1953 in Blackburn’s Proensa, a revelation of the beauty to be found in troubadour song ‘made new’ and a tribute to the influence of Pound” (ibid.).
Published by the poet Robert Creeley’s Mallorca-based Divers Press, Proensa was a bilingual translation of eleven texts by seven Provençal poets. It was on the basis of this work that Blackburn received a Fulbright fellowship to continue his Provençal studies at the University of Toulouse during 1954–1955. When the fellowship ended, he stayed in Europe for a couple more years, at first teaching English conversation at Toulouse while researching Provençal manuscripts and editions at French and Italian libraries, then moving through towns in Spain and Mallorca, writing his own poems and translating. By 1958, Blackburn had produced a substantial booklength translation of troubadour poetry. As he put it in a postcard to Pound (dated “IV. 17.58”),
I have the anthology of troubadours licked now. 105 pieces (cut fr/ 150—and want to bet they’ll want to cut it more?). But the works, fr. G[uille]m. to Cardenal, Riquier and Pedro de Aragon. (1285). 8 years on this job. I hv. an extra carbon without notes, if you will send it back after a bit Just say you care to see it.[8]
Perhaps the most decisive moment in Blackburn’s apprentice-ship as a modernist poet-translator was his correspondence with Pound. Beginning in 1950 and continuing off and on until 1958, Blackburn wrote to Pound at St. Elizabeth’s and occasionally visited him after relocating to New York. With these letters Blackburn frequently sent Pound his translations, seeking detailed, word-by-word criticisms as well as answers to specific questions about the Provençal texts. Pound’s first response, scrawled over a single sheet of paper, encouraged Blackburn to develop a translation discourse that “modernized off Joyce onto Ford” (10 February 1950). Later Pound explicitly endorsed Blackburn’s translations, instructing Dorothy Pound to write that “you have a definite feeling for the Provençal and should stick to it” and then arranging for the publication of one version. In a typescript added to Dorothy’s letter, Pound wrote: “[Peire Vidal’s] {227} ‘Ab l’alen’ sufficiently approved for Ez to hv/ forwarded same to editor that pays when he prints” (12 August 1950).
Most importantly, Pound’s letters furthered Blackburn’s education in the modernist cultural agenda. Pound’s first response attacked language use in the United States from the standpoint of modernist poetics:
Pound suggested that Blackburn read certain troubadours from modernist angles: “Pieire Cardinal was not hiding under aestheticism” (undated; 1957?); “Try Sordello” (1 December 1950). He recommended that Blackburn meet other modernist poets living in New York, like Louis Dudek and Jackson MacLow (4 July 1950). And he urged Blackburn to study cultural and economic history “to set the stuff IN something,” to situate his Provençal translations in a historical context (25 January 1954?). Pound repeatedly criticized academic institutions for failing to teach a sense of history and sometimes even quizzed Blackburn on historical figures:
Ignorance of history in univ/ grads/ also filthy. blame not the pore stewwddent, but the goddam generations of conditioned profs/ // /thesis fer Sister B/: absolute decline of curiosity re/every vital problem in U.S. educ/ from 1865 onward. whentell did Agassiz die? anyhow.)
The sense of history that Pound taught in these letters avoided any wholesale reduction of the past to the present, as well as any reduction of the present to the past. The former led to “‘modernizing’ / curricula, i.e. excluding any basic thought from ALL the goddam univs” (20 March 1950), whereas the latter led to an antiquarianism without contemporary relevance: “merely retrospective philology LACKS vitality” (1957?). The “vitality” came from allowing the historical difference of earlier cultures to challenge the contemporary cultural situation. “BLACKBURN,” Pound wrote, “might git some life into it IF {228} he/wd/extend his curiosity,” and then he provided a reference to the historian Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay (1895): “Vid Brooks Adams/ Civ/ & Dec Knopf reissue / p.160” (25 January 1954?).
The fact that Blackburn was learning from this correspondence is clear in his 1953 review of Hugh Kenner’s study The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Blackburn described Pound’s “strongest and most criticized positions”: his “case for the honorable intelligence as against the material cunning of usurers” and “his insistence on definition and exactitude as against muddle, the deliberate obscuring of facts and downright mendacity” (Blackburn 1953:217). In this rather negative review, Blackburn affected a cranky tone that sounded remarkably like Pound, questioning Kenner’s decision to criticize the critics of The Cantos: “He puts a mouthful of teeth in those moth-eaten wolves, journalism and education, and that other pack of elderly puppies who run with what he calls ‘the upper-middle-brow literary press,’ and then proceeds to beat them off” (ibid.:215). The question Blackburn addressed to Kenner, as well as to every reader of Pound’s poetry, was
why waste time on the dunderheads? Spend your honest effort positively, do the honest work, educate from the top, where there is any. Kung says: “You can’t take all the dirt out of the ground before you plant seed.”
Blackburn seems to be alluding to Pound’s Confucianism in The Cantos (“Kung says”), an allusion that casts Blackburn as Pound, establishing a process of identification for the reviewer (an aspiring poet—translator), yet in a way that is recognizable to the reader of the review, understood as a pose. The correspondence further complicates the allusion by revealing another, more competitive level of identification: this passage from Blackburn’s review is a plagiarism; the tone, the ideas, even the words are actually Pound’s. Blackburn was quoting from one of Pound’s letters to him, although without acknowledgement:
[8]
I cite the Blackburn—Pound correspondence from Paul Blackburn, Letters to Ezra Pound, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Letters to Paul Blackburn, Paul Blackburn Collection, Archive for New Poetry. Neither collection contains Blackburn’s first letters to Pound in 1950. Some of the correspondence is dated, either by the correspondents or by archivists; dates I have conjectured on the basis of internal evidence are indicated with a question mark. My reading of Blackburn’s relationship to Pound is indebted to Sedgwick 1985.